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Beware the PayPal Email Scams!

Looking at my SPAM filter, I notice that nearly a quarter of my emails
appear to be from PayPal. Of course, these are all spoofed to appear
that way.

If you get an email from PayPal, DO NOT CLICK ON ANY LINKS IN THE
EMAIL!

Instead, fire up your browser of choice, and type in www.paypal.com in
the address bar. Nearly all of these emails are fakes. Here’s an example
of a particularly tricky one that raised alarms and almost caused a knee
jerk reaction till I realized it was a fake. It played upon a simple
fear.

You have added

brian12313@yahoo.com

as a new email address for your PayPal account.

If you did not authorize this change or if you need assistance with
your account, please contact PayPal customer service at:

https://www.paypal.com/row/wf/f=ap_email

Thank you for using PayPal!\
The PayPal Team

Please do not reply to this e-mail. Mail sent to this address cannot
be answered. For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and choose
the “Help” link in the header of any page.

—————————————————————-\
PROTECT YOUR PASSWORD\

NEVER give your password to anyone and ONLY log in at

https://www.paypal.com/.

Protect yourself against fraudulent websites by opening a new web
browser (e.g. Internet Explorer or Netscape) and typing in the PayPal
URL every time you log in to your account.

PayPal Email ID PP007

This is a standard notice when adding a new email address to your PayPal
account. What caught my attention is that the email address has the name
brian. My brother is named Brian, so instinctually I wondered if he made
a mistake with his own paypal account, adding me as an address.

But soon, I realized that this has to be a scam, simply because EVERY
email I seemingly get from PayPal appears to be a scam.

Notice the URL https://www.paypal.com/row/wf/f=ap_email so helpfully
included to ostensibly help you contact PayPal customer service. In my
email, this was a link. When I hovered my mouse over it, it’s displays a
completely different URL at some server with the IP 220.80.212.211. A
quick DNS Lookup shows this is not a PayPal server.

In fact, EVERY “link” in this URL points to that IP address, even the
word brian12313@yahoo.com which you would expect to be a mailto: link.
Very sneaky.